The Rest of Us: A Novel (26 page)

The stool and card table were back in the center of the floor with my Meatyard book splayed open to a photograph from the 1950s—a huge sky looking ready to devour the barn and the child standing alongside it. All this meant a translator had yet to be selected. I had missed another round of interviews that Fedir had judged, quite stringently, even getting into a finicky lexical debate with one woman. He’d won. That woman wasn’t called back.

“Why do you still need a translator if Lazar’s coming?” I said.

“Different type of work. And I’m not sure Lazar’s going to want to be in all day doing this. He may want to sightsee.”

“Where’s he going to stay?”

“Here, of course.” Still beaming with the plan. He was far more excited talking about this potential guest than he ever seemed when I came in the door. “At least initially. If it’s longer, we’ll have to work something out.”

I was annoyed. “Doesn’t he have school? What about the circus?”

“He has a break coming up for vacations. They have them in that type of school, too.”

Something had shifted during the course of their correspondence—Rhinehart was now proud of Lazar’s circus career. There was no more mention of his emerging talent as a poet—the translation idea had been
dropped. Instead, Rhinehart began educating me about aerialists, who had the most physically demanding role in the circus, one needing impeccable timing and judgment. You had to have complete control of your body, even as it was coasting through the air. And you had to have acting skills as well, as everything had a story. Even the trapeze, which could articulate a complex narrative of two lovers caught in a betrayal.

Despite myself, I was curious as to what, specifically, Lazar’s signature moves were. He seemed too tall and gawky to be a gymnast.

Rhinehart told me, “He’s trained in many forms, which adds to his portfolio. He can do bareback acrobatics, balancing on his head on the trapeze, complicated trampoline maneuvers, which are lead-ups to trapeze work . . .”

“He can balance on his head on the bar? While it’s swinging?”

“Well, there’s a cup, but still it’s very difficult. He keeps his arms and legs out for balance. He’s very good. His teacher wrote me, saying he’s one of the best students he’s seen in his career. And he works very hard. Ten hours a day sometimes.” Rhinehart was looking for something, maybe this letter, to show me as proof. I wasn’t interested.

“How long is he going to stay?”

“As long as he can get a visa for, Tatie. I’m not going to invite him over here and then send him to an overpriced hotel!”

“But how long are we talking? Two weeks, a year?” I pictured the three of us cooped up here together and felt suffocated.

“I can’t answer that! It depends on him, whether he likes it and wants to stay. Whether he can.”

“But what about school? You’re going to ask him to give up his career for the chance to see a couple of musicals and drink with you down at the pub?”

Rhinehart turned away from me and said, “We have aerialist programs in the U.S., too.”

“They can’t be on par with what he’s in now. You said his school was one of the best in the world.”

“The New York Circus Arts Academy is quite good. And it’s in Queens. I’m going to take him on a campus visit when he comes.”

“Never heard of it.”

I picked up a circus book that had been lying on the coffee table, or maybe he’d always had it out and I’d never noticed. On the cover was a top-hatted MC, the mike being lowered into his expectant hands. The dark vertiginous slant of the stadium, the dizzying crisscross of ropes and cables overhead. A dusty circular arena, same format as when a chained lion and bear were pitted against each other. To some of the glossy pages, Rhinehart had attached Post-it notes: “Full-twisting layout salto,” “Clown being used to distract us from equipment getting dismantled.”

I said, “Are you aware how they treat the animals in the circus? How they abuse them? That’s what I think of first—the smell of piss and misery.”

“I was going to get us tickets to Ringling Brothers. But now that doesn’t seem like such a good idea.” He had his back to me. The conversation was over. “It’s been an exhausting day. Probably be better if you went to Brooklyn tonight.”

As if I did anything different anymore. As I was unlocking the door, he said, “Maybe I should have done that photo project with you when you asked.”

It wasn’t so long ago that I believed we’d be able to inspire each other. Rhinehart had always been my model for artistic success, but was that even true anymore? He hadn’t really demonstrated his creativity in years. Once I had that thought I was ashamed of it.

He turned around in his chair to look at me. “I can’t imagine collaborating now. Can you?”

•  •  •

I was sad when I left his apartment that night. Two days later, I was enraged. How thoroughly unenjoyable all of this was to me—Lazar’s tourist visit, Rhinehart’s inviting me to the circus. The
circus
! As if this was something I’d be interested in! They wouldn’t even allow me to photograph in there without elaborate permits. Why not invite me for a trip upstate to Dia:Beacon—how many times had I
mentioned I wanted to go but didn’t have a car. He didn’t give a shit about what I cared about.

For Hallie, I spared no details in outlining Rhinehart’s plans for taking me to the circus, the same circus she had wanted to picket three years running because they had elephants and a lion. I was too angry to try and protect him from her judgment, and I ranted for a good twenty minutes. On the other end of the line was dead silence. I thought we’d been disconnected, and said, “Hello?”

She said, “I don’t blame him. You’ve been running around like a fucking eighteen-year-old away from home for the first time. Are you doing coke?”

I had actually been tempted to last night. Hallie had an uncanny way of guessing these things. “No,” I said.

“Well, you sound hopped up. Either high or hungover every time I see you. If I were him, I’d be annoyed, too. I’m annoyed right now, just listening to this.”

I tried to explain his plan to have Lazar come over here, and how we’d never have any time alone together, and how he was obsessed with Lazar, obsessed with Ukraine, still, and she said, “You act as if all this is new to you. When you’ve been supporting him, giving him lots of feedback and whatever since last summer. And now you’re off around town, and so he’s focusing on this relative. Shit, what man doesn’t withdraw when he’s angry. They
all
do. I thought you and I had agreed on that.”

I protested. “I’ve always been there for him! And now when things are actually going well for me, and he’s in a position to support me or at least talk to me about it, he refuses to.”

“You’re out with his ex-wife! Of course he’s going to avoid that situation. That’s
normal.
What’s weird is how much time you’re spending with her. There’s a big ball of deceit in that relationship.”

“Listen to you, as if you’re some kind of prophet, a Buddha now.”

She handled this calmly, as if speaking to an ignorant person. “And bullshit she doesn’t suspect you have contact with him. She’s just not talking about it because like you, she doesn’t want to end the
party. She’s dependent on you—you’re her little buddy, willing to go out
every
night. And let me ask you something, what kind of woman in her late forties is out partying like this, clubs and whatever, who isn’t a cokehead or going through some midlife crisis.”

This called up an image of Laura, her sweaty forehead with strands of blond hair stuck to it, hunched over the table, doing a line. Her pupils were so dilated, the blue in her eyes was gone. She was pulling on my arm to tell me something, going too hard to form the words.

I was quiet, and Hallie said, “I could give a shit about her, except in some sort of abstract way. There’s your Buddhism for you. But what’s going to happen is you’re going to come down off this, get bored or start feeling dirty, or whatever. As much as you think you can hang, I know this lifestyle, and it’s not for you. It’s going to run its course, and you’re going to have one major fucking hangover, and I just hope you don’t do too much damage in between. You always think you’re the only one who gets hurt—that mind-set is really dangerous. You have the power to hurt people, too.”

•  •  •

It did come to an end one bitter cold night when I watched a friend of Dash Snow’s do so much meth he went into a seizure sitting next to me and the paramedics had to come. After the ambulance left, everyone went back inside to get high, and I thought, “What am I doing here?” Less than an hour later I was home, staring at myself in the mirror—there were dark circles under my eyes where the mascara had run. I still heard my bar voice, insistent and obnoxious, going on and on about this collaboration I wanted to do. It had become my “signature idea,” and I’d whore it out for anyone who’d listen. I’d yet to find a collaborator. It was already March and what did I have to show for anything? I’d barely been shooting these past weeks. The most valuable gallery connection remained the one I’d made with Tunis at the MoMA event, and she was booked up for the next two years.

I spent the next few days reading, rearranging my apartment, and
sketching out ideas. Laura called me incessantly, trying to get me to go out, even after I explained to her why I wanted to stay in. I realized how little she knew me. Eventually, I started screening her calls, recalling the neediness that had put me off when we’d met months before.

I was ashamed to call Rhinehart. I also didn’t know what to say. We hadn’t spoken in nearly two weeks, since our argument about Lazar. He had phoned me once but hadn’t left a message, and I hadn’t returned the call. I’d been afraid of us sniping at each other one too many times, so that it pushed us to do something drastic.

Two nights later, I woke up at 3 a.m. with the acute sense that I’d let something very important die through neglect, and the thought was so frightening that I picked up the phone and called him. I hung up and called again, and again he didn’t answer, and I slept fitfully for the rest of the night. The next morning I left a message. “I’m so sorry. If you only knew how bad I feel. Can’t we just get together and talk? Try and mend this?” By one that afternoon, he hadn’t gotten back to me. I called again. Left another message. At 4:30, I got my spare keys and took a cab to his apartment.

H
e wasn’t there. It looked as if he hadn’t been there for days. Everything about the apartment signaled abandonment. The air was stale and foreboding. There were dust motes in the strip of light over the television set, and the kitchen sponge was shriveled and dry. I moved anxiously, quickly. In the bedroom, I rifled through his dresser, sliding both hands underneath the folded piles, while listening for the scrape of his key in the lock. But he didn’t come home.

His passport was missing, as were some of his clothes. I went into his study, which seemed larger. It took me a second to realize furniture had been moved out, only the studio bed remained, along with a small dresser that looked new. Was this in preparation for Lazar’s visit? Rhinehart hadn’t told me whether he’d gotten the visa. Maybe he’d gone back to Ukraine to try and speed up the process? The pull-down desk was now in the living room. It was unlocked, and I picked through the drawers like a thief. There was far less here than there used to be, and I couldn’t find any of his genealogy materials at all, except for that piece of foolscap.

In his filing cabinet I found a manila folder labeled with Lazar’s name, which I pulled out in the hopes it might contain an email address. In it were visa requirements downloaded from the government website, photocopies of support letters, including a hyperbolic one from Rhinehart, which I skimmed. There were color brochures of that circus academy in Long Island City and a form from the admissions committee responding to Rhinehart’s request for more information.
There was an envelope from the circus school in Kiev. Inside it was a praising letter from Lazar’s teacher—which was short, but did indeed say Lazar was one of the best students they’d seen there—and a printout of an email from last week. It took me a moment to process as I was also wondering how widespread the Internet was in Ukraine. Rhinehart seemed to send and receive a lot of correspondence via regular mail.

Dear Mr. Rhinehart,

I have now talked about our plans with my family, and we have made decision that I will stay in Ukraine to finish my study. Please do not be too disappoint. It is what we all think is the right choice made for me. But I am happy we completed our project together. It was much work with dictionary but worth it!

Maybe one day when I am famous acrobat I come to New York and I take you to dinner at the restaurant you mention many times where there are photographs of famous people on the walls. I will bring photograph of myself to hang on wall so that you will be proud and can say, “this is Lazar, who I know.”

On behalf of my family, I send you all good wishes for a prosperous future.

Your friend [and relation ;) ],

Lazar

On the second read, I became angry. How hurt Rhinehart must have been, receiving this stilted email with “my family” written all over it as if he were some foreign huckster, attempting to lure Lazar away. The hours he’d spent on the visa application! After all he’d done for this kid, and he wouldn’t even address him as “uncle”!

•  •  •

As I was trying out different passwords to break into Rhinehart’s computer to see if there was a record of a flight, Laura called. For some reason, I decided to answer. I was in a state of guilt, terrorized by flash memories of how self-absorbed I’d been, maybe I just
needed to hear another person’s voice. The minute I picked up, I knew it was a mistake. After chastising me for not returning her calls, she launched in with details of a benefit party in a collector’s Tribeca apartment where Bono was supposed to make an appearance. She was talking at me as if I’d already agreed to go, and I eventually cut her off—“Now’s not a good time.”

“What could you possibly be doing that’s more important than this? Have you been
listening
to me? I said Bono’s going to be there. In the
room
.”